LEO’S LEADING LADY
WHEN Leonardo DiCaprio took to the stage at the Royal Opera House on Sunday night to give an acceptance speech for his fi rst ever Bafta award win, he ran through the usual lengthy list of thankyous to colleagues and collaborators.
But there was one woman who merited the most heartfelt tribute of all. Many actresses and supermodels have come and gone as Hollywood’s most notorious Lothario has cut a swathe through Tinseltown but this particular lady has been a fi xture in his life every step of the way.
Winding up his speech, DiCaprio, 41, said: “And lastly there’s one person I have to thank. I would not be standing up here if it wasn’t for this person. I didn’t grow up in a life of privilege, I grew up in a very rough neighbourhood in east Los Angeles.
“This woman drove me three hours a day to a different school to show me a different opportunity. It’s her birthday today. Mom, happy birthday. I love you very much.”
As every dedicated DiCapriophile knows, the actor who shot to fame in Titanic 18 years ago would do almost anything for the Germanborn woman who goes by the exotic name of Irmelin Indenbirken.
When DiCaprio outbid Paris Hilton for a $ 10,000 Chanel handbag at a charity auction in Cannes last May it wasn’t so he could gift it to one of his many girlfriends but because he knew 73- year- old Irmelin would love it.
If he wants to summon up the emotion to play a character overwhelmed with grief in one of his fi lms he imagines he has returned home to fi nd Irmelin “horribly charred in a fi re”.
And when he turns up for the Oscars, it’s no surprise if the woman on his arm is his beloved mother.
The closeness of their relationship has its roots in the trying circumstances of his upbringing. Irmelin and her husband George DiCaprio were 1960s hippies who separated soon after their son was born in 1974.
HE WAS named Leonardo while still in the womb after his mother felt him kick for the fi rst time while she was admiring a painting by Leonardo da Vinci at the Uffi zi Gallery in Florence.
George, a writer and editor who went on to become a successful comic book distributor on the US West Coast, wanted to make sure his son grew up with a father fi gure close at hand so he moved in next door to Irmelin with his second wife Peggy Farrar.
But it was his ex- wife who bore the brunt of bringing up a child in the unsalubrious LA district of Los Feliz. In an interview two years ago DiCaprio claimed there was “a major prostitution ring on my street corner” and “crime and violence everywhere”. An alleyway near his home was frequented by crack and heroin users and the sights he witnessed there put him off drugs for life.
“Never done [ drugs],” he told the LA Times. “That’s because I saw this stuff literally every day when I was three or four years old.”
By the time he was fi ve, Irmelin had arranged for her son to make his TV debut in Romper Room, a long- established TV series for preschoolers in which the children would participate in “games, exercises, songs and moral lessons”. Unfortunately, the toddler who was to become one of the most bankable stars in movies was fi red for being too disruptive. Back home his future was soon not looking particularly bright.
The local public schools in Los Feliz were not of the highest standard and the young DiCaprio was nicknamed “Leonardo Retardo” as he got a reputation for copying his classmates’ work and breakdancing in the cafeteria.
Inspired by the success
of
his stepbrother Adam Farrar, who appeared in a number of TV commercials, DiCaprio persuaded his mother to drive him to auditions and he made his fi rst commercial – for Matchbox toy cars – at 14.
His fi rst fi lm role followed three years later. Unfortunately it was in the straight- to- video turkey Critters 3. DiCaprio’s big break came in 1993, when Robert de Niro plucked him from a pool of hundreds to appear in This Boy’s Life.
Later that same year he earned the fi rst of his fi ve Academy Award nominations for his supporting role as Arnie Grape in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? opposite Johnny Depp.
It was not until he was 22 that
Daily Express Tuesday February 16 2016 DiCaprio cut the apron strings with Irmelin and moved out of the house they shared into a small bungalow bachelor pad in Santa Monica, a short hop from the rolling breakers of the Pacifi c.
But mother and son were not living apart for long. In 1998 he acquired a beach house in Malibu for £ 1.1 million, and, according to showbusiness daily Variety, “the house has long been used on either a full- or part- time basis by the star’s mother”.
By now, DiCaprio’s career had been turbo- charged by his performance opposite Kate Winslet in James Cameron’s blockbuster Titanic. The fi lm went on to win 11 Oscars and four Golden Globes and, while DiCaprio was not nominated for an Oscar and lost out to Peter Fonda as Best Actor at the Golden Globes, the boy from the wrong side of the tracks in LA was now established as box- offi ce gold.
Off- screen meanwhile, his antics were providing plenty of fodder for the gossip columns which knew him and his entourage as the Pussy Posse.
Together with close friends such as the actor Tobey Maguire, magician David Blaine and Lukas Haas – a fellow actor who shared a house with DiCaprio until 2010 – the hottest star in town chased girls and partied at all the most fashionable venues.
In the years that followed, a string of girlfriends came and went including the supermodels Gisele Bundchen, Bar Refaeli and – most recently – Kelly Rohrbach.
MEANWHILE, the legal secretary who had worked several jobs to provide for herself and her son can now afford to take things a bit easier. Unlike her son, Irmelin has also found love in the shape of twinkly- eyed charmer David Ward.
He identifi es himself on Twitter as @ DosEquisMan, as he is a lookalike for the “The Most Interesting Man In the World” – the seventysomething playboy character with the mane of silver hair and beard who fronts commercials for the Mexican beer brand.
He and Irmelin have been a couple since 2012 when DiCaprio and Ward’s daughter Emily – wife of Black Keys drummer Patrick Carney and best friend of Fifty Shades Of Grey star Dakota Johnson – set them up on a blind date.
DiCaprio broke his duck at the Baftas by being named Best Leading Actor for his role in epic Western The Revenant, which has swept the board at all the main pre- Oscar award ceremonies.
Now all eyes are on the Best Actor category in this month’s Academy Awards as fans wait to see if DiCaprio can win his fi rst Oscar at the fi fth time of asking.
He is the hot favourite to do so and with such a signifi cant milestone in prospect nobody would be surprised if it was his mother he chose to walk up the red carpet with him once again.